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Nation of Origin: USA

Ratings:
Kim: 1 out of 5
Justin: 2 out of 5

Notes:

This movie was dreadfully boring, it wasn’t the worst film we’ve seen this month, but it comes really close. Creep was meandering and unengaging but it had momentum. This flick was pretty slow except for a handful of sequences and I’d still say it was way less stupid than The Last House in The Woods. Wes Craven, for some reason, got his name on the box as “presenter” but there is no indication that he had any hand in making the film. I guess since the film was more or less about insomnia and night terrors and because Wes Craven’s name is so strongly associated with Nightmare on Elm Street, the producers figured they get more asses in seats by putting the name of an “expert” on the cover.

Julia has night terrors and since she’s been studying for her Master’s they have subsided, until she comes back into contact with an old friend with a similar affliction and she starts experiencing them all over again. This film took 74 minutes just to get started and then, once it started, it ended, and you didn’t feel like anything was accomplished. I keep saying this over and over, but the number one element for good horror is you have to establish some kind of feelings for or against the main character. Sure, the film plays around with the idea of obscuring whether or not Julia is going insane, but you still have to like her. I didn’t like her. I didn’t hate her, either, and therein lies the problem. All of Julia’s friends are just as boring as she. Ethan Embry is in this film– possibly the most likeable happy-go-lucky guy ever– and the filmmakers were such jackasses that they cast him as this rude, ironic, grumpy painter.

The little night creatures are pretty creepy considering you can barely get a glimpse of them for 80% of the film, but during the climactic scene in a subway tunnel where Julia is attacked by a mob of the things, it appears these creatures are nothing more than an angry pile of barbecue ribs.

Once I realized they were just ribs, this entire film made more sense to me. Julia is tragically underweight during the entire film, and all of her friends are obviously bulimic (one of them going so far as to shoot himself in the head before taking another bite at a diner). The ribs aren’t trying to kill Julia, they just want her to eat them, but in her hysterical state of malnourishment she runs away from them.

Nation of Origin: Spain

Ratings:
Kim: 4 out of 5
Justin: 3 ^1/2 out of 5

Notes: The English translation of this film’s title is Shiver and that may be the most ambiguous title of any film we’ve watched thus far. Shiver could mean any damn thing and, having watched the film, I’m not exactly sure what the title is in reference too.. I guess it is just a reaction to fear itself. On one hand, you rent a movie not knowing a damn thing about it, on the other hand you rent a movie not knowing anything about it. I suppose that if you are are a filmmaker who is confident that your film works then ambiguity is not a bad way to go. I think this one works.

When, Santi, a troubled young teen with semi-prominent canine teeth and an allergic reaction to sunlight moves into a valley town with his mother to escape the direct sunlight, a number of brutal killings occur. The Villagers view Santi, his mother and their city-slicker ways with suspicion (as villagers are known to do) and Santi spends the rest of the film professing his innocence and leading his own investigation to find and capture the lightning-fast creature that seems to be doing the real killing.

I prefer my horror simple and effective, and this is far from simple. It’s kind of a murder mystery wrapped up like a horror movie. The problem is even though Eskalofrío works great as a horror film, as a mystery it violates one of the big rules of that genre: it withholds information until the end so there is no real way for the audience to figure what’s going on. The fun thing about the supernatural is almost all of the myths behind our favorite movie monsters are based somewhat in fact. (Caution, slight spoiler): This film doesn’t have as much to do with vampires as you would believe, but the underlying situation of the film is one very possible, but implausibly complicated, series of events. Really, the whole gimmick of this film is to overload the viewer with as many red herrings as possible so as to confuse them and then send some murderous child-beast in to send them over the edge with panic. Which, actually, totally works.

CAUTION SPOILER DO NOT READ: Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but, again, why the hell were so many people scared of that cute little Japanese boy in The Grudge?? Between Eskalofrío and [Rec] I am positive that Spain has the scariest flesh eating little girls on the planet.

Nation of Origin:
USA (Shot in Canada and most of the production is French, but its an English language film)

Ratings:
Justin: 4 ^1/2 out of 5
Kim: 4 ^1/2 out of 5

Notes: It’s really interesting how so few premises there really are in horror. A lot of modern horror films do away with the supernatural and get right into the potentially terrifying world our everyday lives take place in. We totally take for granted that so many potentially lethal (or at best, brutally inconvenient) situations never actually occur. In the case of P2, Angie, a somewhat self-absorbed young professional who has forsaken her roots to live in the big city and is trying to go home for Christmas. Despite this, she doesn’t have the “teeth” required to make it in New York, she timidly shrugs off the apologies of a co-worker who had made unwanted advances on her the night before and when what appears to be a series of unfortunate events that keep her locked in the parking garage, she encounters an obsessive security guard who “just wants to help her.” While other slasher films play with morality and send a violent killer after loose women, even Tom knows that Angie “is not a slut.” The angle in P2 is somewhat more realistic that normal slasher trash: Angie is being preyed upon simply because she is passive and alone.

The whole “young urban female getting locked inside of a public building” concept is exactly the same premise as in Creep, which we watched earlier this month (and hated). The remarkable similarities between the two films is staggering because that film really sucked and this one was goddamn awesome. One of the big differences might be coming from behind the scenes: the film was co-written by Alexandre Aja (the director/writer of Haute Tension, a favorite of ours this month) and Franck Khalfoun (who played Jimmy in Haute Tension) and respectively Produced and Directed by the pair. I think I love these guys. Much like Haute Tension, the concept is so pedestrian and common on paper, but so unbelievably satisfying and well done on the screen that you will find yourself unable to explain what is so awesome about it to your friends. Hitting the mark where Creep clearly missed is the emotional element: the first rule of slasher horror is that you have to make the audience choose sides. You are either with the killer or the victim and you have to make the audience acknowledge that connection. Angie is a beautiful and seemingly decent human being thrust into a very ugly and terrifying situation: done, you’ve got us hooked, now what? She endures the very worst and you are with her the entire time, she’s not annoying or obnoxious (the bane of the horror damsel) and she goes from victim to tormentor in very gradual and satisfying way.Tom is an unlikely antagonist who is capable of fits of rage while maintaining an aura of boyish charisma that makes you kind of like him but still ultimately want to see him get it in the end.

Something I found similar to Haute Tension are filmmakers obvious love of American exploitation horror but they are able to do it in such a classy and clever way that it doesn’t quite register as exploitation. Angie spends pretty much the entire film freezing her tailfeathers off in a low cut dress and there’s not many shots in the film where her cleavage isn’t somewhere in the scene… (well, look at the cover of the DVD case, yeah thats the whole film). Also, there are a handful of positively brutal moments that, while completely excessive and violent, don’t seem at all unnecessary for the plot of the film.  Early on it is established to what level Tom’s skewed sense of ethics extends and later we see an example of what Angie’s struggle to survive will cause her to do. So really, the gratuitousness is curbed and it isn’t really gratuitous. Whatever, this is horror we’re talking about, it’s all exploitation: boobs and blood bladders put asses in seats. End of discussion.

Yeah, I don’t have much snarky to say about this film other than it is kind of like Home Alone but if Macaulay Caulkin had fantastic breasts, a fireman’s axe and if it all took place in a parking garage.

I’m writing the post while laying in bed. I like my phone and this wordpress app I just downloaded.

Nation of Origin: USA

Ratings:
Kim: 5 out of 5
Joe: 5 out of 5
Justin: 5 out of 5

Notes:

In Rob Zombie’s re-telling of Halloween, Michael Myers is upgraded from the archetypal taciturn, masked psychopath to a brutal juggernaut (played by Tyler Mane) which Dr. Sam Loomis describes as a “perfect storm of external and internal factors gone horribly wrong.” The fact that he’s 6′5″ doesn’t hurt, either. This version of Halloween gets into the pathology and psychology of Michael Myers which makes for a more compelling interest in the character but the news that Myers is a victim of his childhood kind of flips the audience’s alignment in favor of the slasher. Since criminal psychology wasn’t national past-time in 1979, the updated Halloween expounds more on the origins of The Shape and how he became the pit of nothingness that he is purported to be. Also changed from the original is the escalated level of annoyingness portrayed by Laurie Strode and her friends and as a result you feel far less apathy for Myers’ victims– which tends to be a let down for me because it plays into the tone of the slasher rip-offs that followed the original film.

SPOILER: Any good remake fulfills the expectations of the original film and adds something extra. The final exchange concerning the boogeyman between Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode is only the beginning of a much more grisly ending for Myers which really should have completely eliminated any hope of a sequel (Zombie didn’t want to make a sequel, but did Halloween 2 because the studio wanted to make it and he didn’t want anyone else to ruin his vision). I haven’t seen Halloween 2, but I don’t know how they are going to manage reversing the effects of a point-blank shot from a .357 slug to the face.

Nation of Origin: Japan

Ratings:
Justin: 2 out of 5
Kim: 2 ^1/2 out of 5
Mike: 3 out of 5

Notes:

Honestly, I don’t know what America’s obsession with all things Japanese comes from. Sure they are cute and polite and make neat electronic gadgets and decent automobiles, but I don’t get what made Ju-On and its American remake so popular. Remember in the last review where I said “haunted house” movies are lame because the protagonists always have the option of leaving and never coming back? Well, you’d think Ju-On would be awesome because it removes that intrinsic plot-hole by making the ghosts a kind of communicable disease passable from people who come into contact with the house to the people who come into contact with those people (and they tell two friends, and they two friends, and so on and so on).  Because I have not seen Ju-On 2, I am left to assume they filmmakers develop some kind of avian flu face mask that keeps The Grudge from passing.

I get the feeling that these films were way more intense to Japanese audiences who bought into the “vengeful ghost” superstitions, because I don’t really see these ghosts as being that vengeful. The ghosts in Poltergeist were scarier and that was a Spielberg picture! In most of the examples featured in this film, the possession just makes the victim crazy then they get listless and catatonic– which, really, is nothing a stack of manga can’t do.

The general rule of haunted house films is that they are just kind of creepy, not so much scary and this is no excepton. Apart from that really cool gurgling sound and some creepy little kid, there’s not a whole lot going on in Ju-On that will scare you.

Nation of Origin: USA

Ratings:
Kim: 3^1/2 out of 5
Justin: 3^1/2 out of 5

Notes: Have you ever caught yourself watching an episode of The Ghost Whisperer and thought, “Man this would be so much better if I could swap out Jennifer Love Hewitt with one of the finest actors of the last 50 years?” I’m not normally into haunted house movies because they seem like such an avoidable premise (it’s not like the houses ever follow people to the next city) but this is a pretty great film. The Changeling has probably the lowest death toll of any movie we’ve watched so far (I think a total of 4 and only two of which are directly related to the horror elements of the film) and it’s horror elements are definitely more of the creep persuasion than they are gore or violence.

This isn’t the scariest film you’ll ever see, but it’s definitely creepy. The loud banging noises and predatory wheelchair are very well executed effects and even though I just told you about them you’ll still probably freak out a little when you watch the film. Like most haunted house films though, there’s nothing really overwhelmingly real about the situation and you yell the same refrain at the screen as you did for Poltergeist and Amityville: “MOVE THE HELL OUT OF THE HOUSE!”

Essentially, George C. Scott moves into an old house and acts as a sort of personal injury lawyer for the restless spirit of the 9 year old boy that lives there… something he presumably learned about following the death of his wife and daughter in the beginning of the film. Really, that’s the only joke I can make about this film. It’s a solid picture and it doesn’t attract too much attention to one particular aspect or another. Yeah, I know.. boring review.